Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Welcome to the club :) > > This came up before when I'd been sending mails like this for years, > without realizing the difference: > https://lore.kernel.org/git/nycvar.QRO.7.76.6.2103191540330.57@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ > & https://lore.kernel.org/git/xmqqr1k9k2w7.fsf@gitster.g/ The organization makes it easier to identify the cover letter, mechanically from the thread structure without relying on the subject line [*], and that is one of the things that the procedure to prepare the "What's cooking" report needs to do. Side note: When the "What's cooking" report is updated, it knows individual commits on a topic, and the message ID of the patch for each of these commits (they are recorded in refs/notes/amlog). But the message ID of the cover letter is not recorded anywhere because it does not become any commit, so it looks at these messages to find references and/or in-reply-to. A flat "everything including cover is reply to previous cover" organization would not help to find the cover of this iteration at all. In Documentation/SubmittingPatches, we give unnecessary either-or recommendation. We should clearly spell it out instead, perhaps something like this. Documentation/SubmittingPatches | 5 +++-- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git c/Documentation/SubmittingPatches w/Documentation/SubmittingPatches index 927f7329a5..af7f2a4045 100644 --- c/Documentation/SubmittingPatches +++ w/Documentation/SubmittingPatches @@ -346,8 +346,9 @@ your code. For this reason, each patch should be submitted Multiple related patches should be grouped into their own e-mail thread to help readers find all parts of the series. To that end, -send them as replies to either an additional "cover letter" message -(see below), the first patch, or the respective preceding patch. +send them as replies to an additional "cover letter" message +(see below), which should be a reply to the "cover letter" of +the previous iteration. If your log message (including your name on the `Signed-off-by` trailer) is not writable in ASCII, make sure that
